Friday, August 22, 2014

Kieran Healy (Duke Uni) and Marion Fourcade (Berkeley) found this recording of Émile Durkheim delivering a talk in 1911 (ht Pedro Souza). This is an amazing piece of history as Durkheim is one the the founding fathers of Sociology. He is also my favourite author of the three little pigs of Sociology, Durkheim, Weber and Marx.

"It’s a fragment of a piece titled Jugements de valeur et jugements de réalité, which you can read in French here. It was recorded in 1911 at a meeting in Bologna, which I think is one of only quite few times that Durkheim left France in order to attend a conference. Here it is. (There’s a short bit of dead silence at the beginning.)"

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Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Big Data and Smart Cities are fairly recent buzzwords in the media and in the academic community. To be honest, these words are so commented that I cannot help rolling my eyes when I read researchers and journalists using them in a sloppy way, as they often do.

So I would like to share this presentation Rob Kitchin gave in Oxford Internet Institute (oii) on March 2014. Rob gives a broad picture of the cutting edge literature on smart urbanism. He also makes the concept of big data pretty clear by contrasting it with more traditional types of data, like population census.

Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Some of my colleagues at the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea - Brazil) are organizing a seminar on 'Modeling Complex Systems for Public Policies'. It is a great initiative to bring some of the cutting edge developments in academia to discuss critical challenges faced in the policy world.

We review the literature about the rich, the affluent and the top incomes focusing in two issues: identification and measurement, and the analysis of the determinants of richness. The review discusses data sources, indicators, populations and units of analysis used for the identification of the rich, approaches used to construct affluence lines and measures of richness. It also surveys empirical results about the composition of the incomes of the rich and the role of direct determinants of richness, such as individual characteristics, the State and the structure of production. We cover literature since the early twentieth century but give special attention to the research conducted after the 2000s.

Thursday, August 7, 2014

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Here is one new study to feature in the list of demographic papers published on Science and Nature. Using free databases with the date and place of birth and death of around 150,000 notable individuals (caveat: biased towards Europe and US), Maximilianandhiscolleagues were able to analyze the migration patterns of those notable individuals over the last 2,600 years (between 600 bc and 2012).

The emergent processes driving cultural history are a product of complex interactions among large numbers of individuals, determined by difficult-to-quantify historical conditions. To characterize these processes, we have reconstructed aggregate intellectual mobility over two millennia through the birth and death locations of more than 150,000 notable individuals. The tools of network and complexity theory were then used to identify characteristic statistical patterns and determine the cultural and historical relevance of deviations. The resulting network of locations provides a macroscopic perspective of cultural history, which helps us to retrace cultural narratives of Europe and North America using large-scale visualization and quantitative dynamical tools and to derive historical trends of cultural centers beyond the scope of specific events or narrow time intervals.